【摘要】In 1908 the Welsh neurologist and psychoanlayst Ernest Jones described human beings as rationalizers whose behavior is governed by "the necessity of providing an explanation." We construct a formal and testable model of rationalization in which a decision maker selects her preferred alternative from among those that she can rationalize. This model is compared to the warm glow model where an agent may prefer one alternative but aspire to choose another. The agent chooses her aspiration if she gets a sufficiently large warm glow payoff for acting as she aspires. 　　　　

【报告人简介】Alvaro Sandroni is the E.D. Howard Professor in Political Economy at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University. Sandroni is on the editorial boards of Economic Theory and the International Journal of Game Theory.  　　Sandroni’s research is in the areas of behavioral sciences, strategic forecasting, economic theory, game theory, political science, and general equilibrium theory. He has published numerous journal articles in economics, political science and game theory journals, including the American Political Science Review, American Economic Review, Econometrica, Annals of Statistics, Review of Economic Studies, Mathematics of Operations Research, Theoretical Economics, International Journal of Game Theory, Quarterly Journal of Political Science, Economic Theory, Journal of Mathematical Economics, Games and Economic Behavior, and Journal of Economic Theory. 　　Sandroni is the author (along with Peter Klibanoff, Boaz Moselle and Brett Saraniti) of Managerial Statistics: A Case-Based Approach (2005, Cengage Learning). He has also published his work in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.